A Kitchen Accident Gets Me Thinking About Health Insurance

One of the topics I’ve been meaning to bring up here is health insurance. I’d
been procrastinating about getting insured — trying to avoid the expense by
coming up with some way to justify going without. After all, some 40 million
of my countrymen and gazilliions of other people manage somehow.

But I think that when it comes right down to it, if things hit the fan and I
really needed a lot of expensive health care for some reason or another, I’d
want all I could pay for and then more. And if I couldn’t guarantee that I
could pay for it, I’d still want it and I’d probably swallow my pride and fall
back on charity, or, <ulp>, government programs.

Which seems dishonest to me. If I know ahead of time that I’d probably behave
this way, I should probably sign up for insurance so I know I could pay my way.

But I think I must have seen this expensive conclusion coming because I kept
putting off thinking about it. Until last week, when I was trying to do some
cleaning in the kitchen and reached out to catch a block of knives that fell
off the counter. The knives slid out of the block and through one of my
fingers. Nasty, jagged cut. Blood everywhere.

10 stitches later I’m fine, but I got to sit in the trauma center at General
Hospital and consider that it could have been something worse. So I applied
for insurance (and was promptly denied, so I’ll have to try somewhere else).
That’ll crowd the budget a bit.

Find Out More!

For more information on the topic or topics below (organized as “topic →
subtopic →
sub-subtopic”), click on any of the ♦ symbols to see other pages on this site that cover the topic. Or browse the site’s topic index at the “Outline” page.